New Computer Helps Prison Guards Understand Dog Barks

Previously, Israeli guards were not using prison dogs to their full potential because it was difficult to determine whether a bark indicated an emergency or simply playful activity. In many cases, important dog barks were ignored because they sounded like normal barking that occurred throughout the day.

Now a new computer will help guards recognize when a bark needs to be acknowledged. “It relays only the barks that are significant in terms of security—barks that reveal stress or aggression in the dog,” explained the head of the Israel Prisons Service canine unit, Noam Tavor.

Other technologies have been developed to help humans communicate with dogs, although Hungarian software unveiled in January is only 3 percent more accurate than humans in interpreting dogs’ emotional states.

A technology company called Bio-Sense recorded several different types of dog barks and determined which ones indicated higher stress levels. Now, computers at Israeli jails are programmed to distinguish between barks of alarm and regular barking. The prison staff will use the new technology to quickly identify when a jailbreak is occurring. Bio-Sense entered thousands of barks into the system to determine, “what makes the emergency bark different than the other barks,” said project manager Orit Netz.

Hungarian scientists have also developed software that can assess a dog’s mood from its vocalizations. The software was tested against the human ability to recognize dog behavior and only just beat the human beings to the right answers. “A possible commercial application could be a device for dog-human communication,” one of the developers told Reuters news agency.

When a dog wags its tail to the right, it is happy. When it is unhappy, the tail moves more to the left. The phenomenon, discovered by Italian scientists, is described in a study published in the magazine Current Biology in March 2007. It is not only an unfamiliar feature of dog behavior, it also runs counter to claims that only human beings show brain asymmetry.

Researchers today question the old belief that dogs do not have emotions comparable to those of humans. Some scientists argue that dogs “love” only because they are given love and care in the first place. Others, however, say dogs’ love is unconditional, much like the emotional connection between parent and child, according to dog trainer Leslie Burgard. “Social animals must be able to read other animals in their society and must be able to maintain social bonds,” biologist and psychologist Susan B. Eirich told Physorg.com. So, it is logical that they have emotions, she concluded.